I think film and television are really a director's medium, whereas theatre is the actor's medium.
I paid my dues at drama school and worked backstage in every Theatre in London.
Imagining things are there that are not really there, with the green screen, is very much like theatre, when you're looking at the fourth wall.
All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.
In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.
I still think of myself as a stage actor. When I do film and television I try to implement what I was taught to do in theatre, to try to stretch into characters that are far from myself.
Enjoy the films I do, get entertained, get your money's worth, and when you leave the theatre, leave it all behind!
I trained in the theatre.
There is a strange pecking order among actors. Theatre actors look down on film actors, who look down on TV actors. Thank God for reality shows, or we wouldn't have anybody to look down on.
The deaf community is in a favorable position because they have a national theatre and training groups of their own to get them started. Deaf actors have often acquired very valuable skills and experience before they get their break.
I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.
I think you can be terribly overexposed. I've been always very careful in my career to do theatre; it takes you out of the television eye, and people are glad to see you back again.
Well, I've always thought that my career was in England, really. I used to do more in the theatre, and I felt that I should be there. It's not far is it? It's amazing the way that special FX have taken a quantum leap in what they're capable of doing.
We depend on the critics to give us a glimpse of what happened. Bernard Shaw championed Ibsen, who got the most terrible notices for his plays. Kenneth Tynan championed young writers, and as a result, the theatre has changed radically.
I came to Mozambique in 1986, when I first became involved with Teatro Avenida - a theatre company that stages plays concerned with political and social issues.
There are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my $7 at the theatre watching their movies.
But I loved the theatre and I was just doing theatre 24/7 and kept dropping courses because I didn't have the time and the chancellor thought that wasn't a good idea after awhile.
I'd applied to graduate school for playwriting, and I got rejected by every school. I felt that theatre was closed but that, when it came to film, the door was very slightly ajar. If I have any virtues, it's that I'm good at walking through doors that are slightly ajar.
When I used to do musical theatre, my dad refused to come backstage. He never wanted to see the props up close or the sets up close. He didn't want to see the magic.
I like to use my hands. When I was in theatre in college, that was one of my biggest notes: 'You use your hands too much.'
I met my wife Anne who was a sociology student, and her influence together with activities associated with the student movement of the time opened up my interests amongst other things into the theatre, art, music, politics and philosophy.
In fact, one was so booked out we went from March and were to go till November, but the pantomime was booked so they transferred the show to the Prince of Wales Theatre because it was so packed out, and it ran on from there.
I used to drive up from theatre in Michigan to Stratford, Ontario to watch every show. I idolized the actors from Stratford. I was very influenced by them because they would come down and work at my theatre and get time on their American Equity union cards.
The theatre show-biz types don't change much, no matter what era we're in. The question of how you balance being in show business with your personal life isn't very different.
The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.
I spent seven years in clubs in England, Australia, etc. Not all comedians cross over to sell out in a theatre.
I did work a lot in Scots theatre, but I was never really successful in Scottish film or TV until I went down to London - and I had to go to the U.S. to get my big break.
I got into this thing called the National Youth Theatre, and to me, that was all about the status quo. It seemed to me like 'Downton Abbey' - all the working-class and black people were playing servants, or the gravedigger in 'Hamlet,' and the boys from Eton and posh private schools got Hamlet, all the big roles.
If these theatres didn't exist, the tradition of British theatre would cease to exist.
In the theatre the audience wants to be surprised - but by things that they expect.
When you combine the men and women deployed from our military installations with activated reservists and members of the National Guard, Georgia is contributing more personnel to the theatre than any other State in our Union.
Every time I listened to Lux Radio Theatre, I wanted to vomit.
I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.
I hate the idea of theatre just being an evening pastime. It should be emotionally and intellectually demanding. I love football. The level of analysis that you listen to on the terraces is astonishing. If people did that in the theatre... but they don't. They expect to sit back and not participate.
A career in the theatre demands so much commitment.
I took up drama and did so much extracurricular work, like the National Youth Theatre and Guildhall's Saturday school. Acting is where I felt most comfortable and how I wanted to express myself.
